Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Authentication System Changed

I was surprised that my planned changed to authentication stirred up some controversy. The basic issue is that Google IDs, which I'm using for authentication, only allow you to use one Google ID at a time. That means that if I force you to switch to a different Google ID (because I need you to prove your email address), that might sign you out on other sites. Not all sites work that way. For example, the way I've done authentication on Puzzazz , you will not be automatically signed out the next time you visit. But that's not the way most sites do it.

In the end, after weighing the options, I decided to go ahead with my plan to switch to only keeping email addresses. Of the various other solutions, all of the good ones are a superset of what I was planning to do, or can easily be built from it. The other solutions are more complicated or more problematic, or keep the problems I was trying to avoid. So, I did it and it's working now, at least for projects. Now I can go back to dealing with the issues that inspired this change.

I forgot to post last night (too many things going on), but the chart still includes yesterday as a working day.

0 comments:

Post a Comment